Scheme

A fraternity loyalty ritual goes blazingly wrong in the jacked-up indie thriller "Brotherhood. " The film invests a lot of emotional energy in raising moral stakes for the kind of boorish male pranksters it's hard to feel sympathy for when one reads about them in newspaper accounts of fatal hazings and sexual assaults. In first-time feature director Will Canon's all-nighter scenario, co-written with Doug Simon, a frat house's carefully rigged scheme to make a pledge think he's robbing a convenience store leads to bullets flying, a wounded freshman, a kidnapped clerk and circumstances that get progressively worse, complete with the kind of shaky handheld camerawork and endless shouting matches that are the usual indie-movie distress signifiers.

A former Countrywide Financial Corp. loan officer has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges related to a nearly $40 million mortgage fraud scheme. Federal prosecutors alleged that Paige Kinney of Phoenix operated the scheme from 2005 to 2007, using “straw buyers” to apply for home loans they never intended to repay. She submitted altered documents, such as bank statements and pay stubs, to make the buyers appear more credit-worthy than they were, prosecutors said.

The scheme at the center of "Nosotros los Nobles" is a flimsy one at best: When Mexican construction mogul Germán Noble (Gonzalo Vega) tires of his grown children's spoiled antics, he fakes an embezzlement scheme and "freezes" their assets. Party boy Javier (Luis Gerardo Méndez), princess Bárbara (the Amanda Peet-esque Karla Souza) and hipster Charlie (Juan Pablo Gil) all go into "hiding" in a rundown fixer-upper and must get real jobs for the first time in their lives - presumably where they could easily follow their family company's perfectly legal and solvent activities in the papers or through friends.

Four men pleaded guilty Friday in Van Nuys Municipal Court to swindling people in a scheme police call the "Jamaican Switch." Authorities said one of the victims in the scheme was Los Angeles attorney James M. Epstein, who said he sniffed out the confidence game and was trying to set up an arrest when he lost $5,000. In the elaborate scheme that netted more than $33,000, at least three more victims each lost thousands of dollars in cash, police Sgt. Dennis E. Adams said.

E. F. Hutton, the nation's fifth largest investment firm, today pleaded guilty and was fined $2 million for a massive mail and wire fraud scheme that netted the company millions of dollars in interest-free loans, the Justice Department said. Hutton was also assessed $750,000 for the cost of the investigation that led to the charges. Trading in Hutton stock on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended at the firm's request at the start of today's session.

An elaborate identity theft scheme has reached the highest levels of the U.S. financial system, striking the personal bank account of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his wife. According to a Washington, D.C., police report, Anna Bernanke's purse was stolen last August from a Capitol Hill Starbucks. From there, the Bernankes' checking account was swept up into a larger scheme, first reported Tuesday by Newsweek magazine.

Tax Shelter Promoter Gets Prison: A former tax shelter promoter, who was convicted for his role in a scheme that generated fictitious losses of more than $1.6 billion, was sentenced to 28 months in prison. Leonard Messinger, 48, of Hillsdale, N.J. was convicted in February for running a tax fraud scheme involving prearranged and bogus transactions in Treasury bills and other securities. Fictitious losses generated by the scheme allowed clients--including CBS President Laurence Tisch, and entertainers Woody Allen and Dick Cavett--to deduct more than $225 million on their tax returns.